From IMDb: “A team of scientists explore an uncharted island in the Pacific, venturing into the domain of the mighty Kong, and must fight to escape a primal Eden.”

There are rumours abound of Universal Studios creating a “Monster Universe” – a bit like Marvel’s cinematic world and DC’s (in my opinion feeble) universe so it’s clearly the done thing currently and Universal want to get in on the action. Their first movie in their franchise is a revisit to a classic monster: King Kong.

I’ll be honest – I don’t think I have EVER watched a King Kong movie. All I know about Kong is that he’s a giant gorilla who climbs the Empire State Building and befriends Nicole Kidman. Shocking I know.

I loved this movie. From start to finish it was two hours of non stop action with exactly the right amount of humour and character development and just cinematic beauty. There wasn’t a single dull or wasted moment in the piece and the only real negative I have to say about the whole cinematic experience was that the other people in the screen wouldn’t shut up as we were watching.

Bearing in mind I know nothing about previous Kong movies or legend, I found the plot for this movie to be incredibly original, and taking into account the fact that this movie is going to be the first in Universal’s Monster Universe, I think it did a pretty good job setting up a few pieces to get things started.

The acting was spot on, and while a lot of the negative reviews I have seen in terms of characters are about Samuel L. Jackson’s character being bit of a dick, I felt this was completely a realistic course of action for his character. Brie Larson was wonderful as she always is; John C. Reilly surprised me – I thought he was going to just be a bit of light comic relief from the trailer but he ended up being crucial to the plot of the movie. I do wish that maybe we’d had a little more back story on Tom Hiddleston’s character but I guess something had to give somewhere.

The CGI was pretty impressive in the movie, and the filmmakers did a really good job of actually making Kong seem not just realistic, but a really relatable character so you understood what was going with him even though obviously he has no lines of dialogue and everything is conveyed with facial expressions and actions.

This movie was fab: if Universal keep bringing this level of filmmaking to the rest of their Monster Universe then it’s going to be a pretty epic journey from here on out. The next one on my radar from Universal is “The Mummy” and currently I don’t know what to expect from that. It’ll be interesting to see how they go about building this Cinematic Universe.